His men were all swarming around the machine now, battering brutally at its armoured sides, and Rosander stumbled over to them, determined to take out his hurt and anger on the thing. It was loosing its weapons, from the front and from the sides, but they were meant to kill lesser things than a Greatclaw Onychoi garbed for war.
‘Don’t mess around!’ he boomed to his followers. ‘Tip the thing over! Let’s see what its guts look like!’
He cast aside his sword and hooked his right hand beneath the lip of curved plates where he could glimpse the machine’s articulated legs. It was trying to back out now, but the Onychoi had it surrounded, pounding and rocking it, whilst others joined Rosander in heaving up one side.
He put all of the strength that would fit in one arm into the effort, and there were four or five others of his kind – huge men with a colossal build that none of these landsmen seemed to have – and they were strong, and in the end the machine just wasn’t as heavy as he had expected. Abruptly it was tipping over, the warriors on the far side scattering so that the great metal beast slammed down on its side and began to revolve slowly as its legs continued to piston.
The underside was metal too, but Rosander was willing to bet that it was nowhere near as tough. He cocked back his good hand for a strike, aiming for the point where the legs met the body.
Out on the water, the Sea-kinden were still arriving. Great clumsy automotives, just enormous curved shields over their powering legs, were clambering onto the wharves, assisted by dozens of Onychoi, or being lifted onto land by hastily erected winches. They were mounted with big spring-powered bolt-throwers and began crawling determinedly forwards the moment that their metal feet were squarely on the ground, shouldering for room amongst the soldiers and the crabs that were still dragging themselves out of the water.
Rosander strode through this bustling chaos, taking a break from the front line because his arm was bruised from wrist to elbow, and because the bannermen of the Thousand Spines were already stationed at most of the places they had been heading for. He had left Chenni in charge because she had a good head on her and could read the map.
Further out, a submersible was surfacing, the curved apex of its nautilus-shell hull breaking the surface as it jockeyed carefully in towards the docks. As Rosander limped closer, he saw a handful of figures clamber out and take stock. He saw the Kerebroi woman, Paladrya, in conference with the little Smallclaw Wys whose submersible it was, and beside them was a stocky figure, armoured head to foot in light shell mail, with a Sea-kinden snapbow in one hand and a landsman shortsword in the other, shifting his footing to keep his balance until he could just step off onto a pier.
Rosander dragged his helmet off, grinning fiercely. ‘Well, now! And you wonder how it would have gone if we’d come for you after all, back then? Wonder no more, landsman!’ He laughed, despite his pain. ‘What would you do now if we decided we wanted to keep this place, once we win it for you?’
‘Oh, I’d find some way to take it back. You know me, Rosander.’ Gauntleted hands reached up to tug away the helm, revealing a dark, serious face, its eyes flicking from the Nauarch to the cityscape beyond.
Stenwold Maker had come home.
Twenty-Five
Greenwise Artector had intended to get out, he really had. When the Eighth Army had descended on Helleron, however, it had come howling out of Three Cities territory far quicker than anyone had expected. He had just not been ready.
He could still have slipped out, nevertheless. Sufficient applications of care and money would have allowed it, because money always spoke loud in Helleron. He had been watched, though. The other magnates of the city already knew that he was a man the Wasps would want to speak to. He had faced a choice, in the end: he could have abandoned his family and staff within the city and crept out like a thief, or he could remain, public and noticeable, sending his family and staff away instead. He had sought within himself for that courage, the self-sacrifice he had always believed he was capable of. Somewhat to his surprise, he had found it. He had stayed on until it was too late to leave, just so that his kin, his servants, his entire household could get clear.
Then, with the noose already closing on him, he had vanished.
All the routes in and out of Helleron had sported eyes on the lookout for this rogue magnate. One of the Council of Thirteen that had governed the city would be recognized, and many on the lookout had been former colleagues, former employees – men who knew his face. The airfields were watched, the gates likewise. After that, there were Wasp soldiers on the streets, and his name was first on their list to apprehend: Greenwise Artector, the missing magnate.
Even so, perfect vigilance was impossible to maintain for long, whether it was the hirelings of the rich or the soldiers of the Empire. Helleron was ostensibly a free city where the ruling council – its thirteenth place now filled by a woman who had until recently been the fourteenth most powerful merchant in the city – took careful advice from a colonel in the Imperial Consortium on all matters. The city’s trade – its life’s blood – ran free, especially that conducted with the Empire to the east. Greenwise could have got out by now, if he had been willing to risk it.
Instead he had decided to take a stand.
He had fallen far from his old haunts. He had gone to the slums, where a man could lose himself and just about everything else. Thankfully he had been making preparations for this day ever since the end of the last war. Helleron’s gangs, the fiefs, had not been friends of the Empire, and the Wasps had done their best to eradicate the network of criminal cartels whose interlocked gears made the city’s underside turn. Greenwise, like many magnates, had his contacts beneath the surface, but he had been marked as a man who opposed the Wasps. Criminals, mobsters and murderers, thieves and racketeers, who cared nothing for anything but their own illicit properties, saw in him something worth keeping alive. Not a hero exactly, for they had no use for a hero, but an ally in these hard times.
They had resources and he had knowledge, and together they were making plans. Greenwise wanted to hurt the Empire and, most of all, his former fellows on the Helleren Council. His new friends from the fiefs wanted to do the same by filling their pockets and perhaps shedding a little blood. The Empire hated their chaos, and the Consortium hated any flow of money it did not control. Had the Wasps used a lighter hand last time round, then no doubt the Imperial merchant arm could just have bought into Helleron’s cesspool of vice, but the crackdowns had closed that door.
Now Greenwise, with a sword and a crossbow hanging from his person and dressed in clothes that would not have been fit to clean his servant’s boots not so long before, was guiding a gang of thieves towards the heartland of the rich. Their target was the townhouse of a man named Scordrey, perhaps the most influential merchant in the city. Nobody was feeling inclined to think small these days.